Gloucester man captures art

February 07, 2010|By By Mike Holtzclaw | | 928-6479

Nicholas Kleczewski knew he wanted to be an unobtrusive observer.

The Gloucester filmmaker was doing a musical documentary about a little-known band — The Snake The Cross The Crown from Huntsville, Ala. — and he didn't want it to be a chronological biography in the "Behind the Music" mold.

"I spent about two weeks on the road with them, and that's not really enough time for some sort of life process to play out on the screen," Kleczewski said. "I wanted my style to be 'fly on the wall,' really. There's no big storyline, nothing like that."

The resulting film — "On a Carousel of Sound, We Go Round," the title taken from one of the band's song lyrics — drew strong reviews when it premiered in October at the Louisville International Festival of Film. It won the top prize in the online Maverick Movie Awards competition for independent features. This month it will play at the Thin Line Documentary Festival in Denton, Texas.

Kleczewski, 29, first saw The Snake The Cross The Crown when he was playing guitar in the Gloucester-based band Atkins Lane. One night, Atkins Lane opened for The Snake The Cross The Crown at a small club in Richmond. Kleczewski knew nothing about the quintet from Alabama, but he watched them step out on stage and within a few minutes he was transfixed by their simple performance and their musical style, which harkens to the Americana of the early recordings by The Band.

"The biggest thing I thought," he recalls, "is that they were completely original. They didn't sound like anyone else who was playing music at that time, and how often do you get to see something that feels totally original?"

One scene in Kleczewski's film captures that sense, as The Snake The Cross The Crown — opening a show for the Philadelphia band mewithoutyou — takes the stage at a club in Chicago and is regarded skeptically by a small audience that shows at best mild curiosity. The band begins playing a slow, stark number called "Cake Walk," and as lead singer Kevin Jones softly sings the lyrics — "I want to live on the stage / I want to play the guitar / And I want to get paid" — the crowd gradually begins to lock in and take notice. By the time the song is done, the band is playing to a room full of converts.

Kleczewski wanted his film to be a meditation on the nature of talent and ambition, an observation of a group of artists at a critical stage in their development when they realize that they are on the cusp of making the kind of music they had always hoped was within their abilities. The band members are pushing themselves toward an artistic goal while wondering if it will ever pay off commercially, and whether that should matter to them.

This theme is played out subtly, never spoken aloud. There is no voice-over narration to the documentary, and the interviews with the band are more about simple observation rather than attempting to advance any sort of narrative story.

"I didn't want to specifically say 'Here is what you should be taking from this,' " Kleczewski said. "It was an opportunity to make a film about a single moment in time. It's an 80-minute film about a moment in time that any artist, any musician, faces when they know they're in the position to really make the kind of art they're capable of, without knowing if anyone is going to notice."

"On a Carousel of Sound, We Go Round" is Kleczewski's first feature-length work as a director. He has done shorter pieces, promotional work in which the performer's label funds the project and retains considerable creative control. His primary work has been as a film editor, most recently on "Song Sung Blue," a quirky musical documentary that drew some attention in 2008.

He worked on a tight budget — "I had to ask myself how much I could stand to lose on this and still recover at the end of the process" — and completed it for about $10,000.

The film ends with lead singer Kevin Jones suggesting that it would be dishonest for a band to alter its sound or its songwriting style in an attempt to match commercial tastes. Instead, he says, the task of a band is to make the best music possible and to let an audience find it.

"We're gonna do our best, try to figure out what it is to be musicians and play," Jones says. "If the music is as good as we always hope that it will be, hopefully people will find it, if it's worth finding."

It is suggested to Kleczewski that this philosophy also applies to the motivations of a filmmaker directing an elliptical, low-budget documentary about a largely unknown band.

He pauses to consider this, and then agrees.

"I didn't consciously think about that," Kleczewski says, "but in retrospect, it makes sense. Maybe I really was trying to step back and tell that to myself."

News to Use

The DVD: "On a Carousel of Sound, We Go Round" is available online at merchnow.com.

The band: For more information on the band, and to watch video clips from the film, go online to snakecrosscrown.com.